Ornamental and edible basil is easy to grow from seed. By mixing different types, you can create unique color and contrast.

MCT / Jennifer R. Bartley

PHILADELPHIA — Flowers go in one bed, vegetables in another. That’s how many of us learned to garden.

But there’s another way, one that combines edible AND ornamental, functional AND beautiful, in a riotous mix of peas and tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, with sunflowers and sage tossed in.

Scholars call this garden a “potager,” from the French potage, meaning soup. It’s also known as a combination garden or, more popular, a kitchen garden.

The traditional vegetable bed is a rectangle sown in stripe-straight, farm-style rows far from the house.

The kitchen garden is way less inhibited, a comely creature placed close to home for all to enjoy and admire. And how easy is that, when it’s richly textured and colorful, and accented with sculptural stakes, twiggy arches, and teepee supports?

Instead of those rigid rows, you’re treated to fluffy mounds of dense purple basil and lime-green lettuces flanked by yellow mums and a tower of red-blossomed scarlet runner beans.

“It’s a real festival of color and butterflies and fragrance,” says Sue Sipos, of Manayunk, Pa., whose 60-by-100-foot “companion garden” in a friend’s yard was a celebrated neighborhood treasure until the property was sold a few years ago.

Sipos might consider a trip to Chanticleer, the 35-acre public garden in Wayne, Pa., that’s the horticultural equivalent of an impressionist painting. It’s designed to engage the senses.

Here you breathe in the lilting fragrances. You might even doze under the pergola, thinking: Imagine getting paid to play — I mean work — in this garden!

Doug Croft does. He’s in charge of Chanticleer’s vegetable garden, a 50-by-50-foot oasis he considers more of a kitchen garden.

This is Croft’s ninth season at Chanticleer, which opened April 1. When it comes to designing vegetable beds, it may surprise some to hear that Croft credits flower arranging for his talent.

“I apply the same design principles to this garden as I would for a floral arrangement,” he says. The list includes color, texture, height, contrast, repetition of plants or colors, and rhythm, which describes how the human eye takes in a display.

That’s also the approach of landscape architect Jennifer R. Bartley of Granville, Ohio, author of Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook.

Bartley’s gardens are to be experienced, tasted, and gazed upon from the kitchen, dining, and family rooms. “If you plant things near either the front door or back door or a place where we can walk by it when we park our cars, that provides a connection to the garden,” she says.

Diversity also helps attract pollinators and predatory insects, birds and butterflies that dine on pests.

“The more you can mix it up, the better,” says Bartley.

She has lovely glass bell jars, or cloches, that protect tender seedlings, sand-colored terra cotta pots, and bamboo stakes painted royal.

And everything points to a new definition for beauty in the garden.

Croft sees it in tall tomatoes trained to a single, regal stem and in the airy, lavender cascades of Bristol Cross oregano.

Bartley sees the potager as a way to deal with the high cost of food, too. Plus, Bartley, adds, “We all need a little bit of paradise.”

Here are some ideas from Bartley, author of a 2006 book on designing kitchen gardens, and others on how to get started:

• Place your garden where you can enjoy it and it can enjoy full sun for at least six hours a day.

• Enclose the garden with a wall or fence with an inviting gate, and plant clematis, morning glories, and other climbers on them. Or try an edible wall of blueberries.

• Celebrate the vertical with bamboo stakes, teepees, and other supports. Balance climbing and creeping, and don’t fear color opposites like red and green.

• Be a drama queen — or king. Choose crinkly, inky kale and blood-red beets.

• Select colorful perennials and annuals for a border and liberally mix herbs (garlic chives, tricolor sage, flat-leaf parsley) and flowering plants with the veggies.

• Plant like a rug — snugly — and as you harvest and make bare spots, plant again.

Gardener Sipos uses many of these ideas in containers. She combines hot peppers and herbs in smaller pots, but she really has fun with long, rectangular window boxes, filling them with sage, thyme, rosemary, basil, parsley and dill, tomatoes and pansies.